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Monthly Archives: October 2012

I was recently interviewed by Lee Dumond (@leedumond), Nick Berardi (@nberardi), and Dustin Davis(@prgrmrsunlmtd) for the latest Mashthis.io podcast. It was an interesting conversation in content syndication, app development, and using APIs to supercharge a content and platform strategy. 48 minutes is big commitment though, so I timecoded our discussion topics and added a few links for context. My favorites are bolded.

You can listen here. The audio is a bit choppy because of Skype difficulties. If you hear the same thing mentioned more than once, it’s probably one of our retakes.

Update 10/23/12

Nick Berardi asked a really important question on document databases vs. relational databases, and I didn’t answer it as well as his question deserved.

Nick noted the trend that organizations tended to have one relational database but that the document DB trend was “pick the best one for the job.” This is a hugely important insight, and there are two intertwined reasons: the intrinsic nature of the tools themselves, and the shift away from traditional client-server architecture to SOA/API-based architecture.

Document databases have so much variability between one another that you really have to pick the best tool based on the capabilities you need vs. the tradeoffs you’re willing to make. They differ by query capability, ACID compliance, clustering, retrieval speed, etc. On the other hand, traditional SQL databases might have 95% overlap, and you’d think that would make it easier to switch between them, but that last 5% has been so relied upon traditionally that it made lock-in the logical choice. Proprietary SQL syntax, stored procedures, or in the case of SQL Server DTS have traditionally been important features for querying and transforming data, and if you wanted to take advantage of them, you needed homogenous architecture.

That’s a good segue to the transition to data services — in our case, RESTful APIs. With standard interfaces you can untether yourself from uniform infrastructure. Your data services may not actually run as fast as if you were syncing databases with proprietary services, but you’ve given yourself more flexibility to pick the best tool and move quickly. Every shop has its favorite tools, but we’ve already used both CouchDB and Redis on small internal services and can see us picking up another document DB here and there as needed.

Beyond flexibility, there’s a lot to be said about developer happiness and productivity. Both come from exploring new tools and picking the right tool for the job. That’s worth a lot.